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If Hari Krishnan were an investor he’d probably be playing the contrarian and buying shares of uranium mines just when the mineral’s market price is dismally low.

He’s a risk taker by nature, but as a cash-strapped artist the stock market is his least concern. Instead Krishnan takes his risks onstage, choreographing bracing works that challenge convention and he’s just about to present what he calls “one of my riskiest works ever.”

This week, as the concluding show in Buddies in Bad Times 2013/14 season, Krishnan’s internationally travelled, Toronto-based inDANCE company will drop what remaining veils the choreographer has deployed to disguise his homosexuality — “queerness” is his preferred term — in a full-frontal, all-male, identity politics-animated new work called SKIN. And it all goes back to the beach.

Krishnan, 43, was born and raised in Singapore’s minority Indian community. He recalls visits to the beach as emblematic of wholesome family outings. Skip ahead a quarter-century or more to Krishnan’s first visit to New York’s Fire Island, a beach of buffed, sun-bronzed gay men, cockerel-strutting their charms in an exhibitionist parade.

By then, having left behind South Asian homophobia and settled in Canada, Krishnan was well along the path to becoming a proudly open gay man. But what he did notice, in the not-so-covert Fire Island courtships, was the varying responses his dark skin colour elicited. Now, some 15 years later, that memory is feeding into an ideas-laden, multi-layered work that, among other things, considers the difference between nudity and nakedness, the one touching on display and voyeurism, the other on transparency and human vulnerability.

Krishnan, who juggles his life as inDANCE founder/director/choreographer with an assistant professorship in dance at Middleton, Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, is a fast and articulate talker. Words tumble forth in complex explanations about gender identity, racial politics and dance esthetics. Most importantly in Krishnan’s verbal flood of ideas is the insistence on his own “hybridity.”

As a youth he studied Western ballet and Bharatanatyam, one of the most revered forms of Indian classical dance. He’s a deep student of the tradition and an incandescently riveting Bharatanatyam dancer. But in Canada he soon immersed himself in contemporary dance.

In the mid-1990s, Krishnan began choreographing works outside the traditional box that, while often referencing his South Asian heritage, did so with iconoclastic wit, using a movement vocabulary drawn from cross-cultural sources.

“I’m not interested in museum pieces, but I am interested in giving tradition contemporary currency,” he explains.

Krishnan will not be dancing in this week’s program yet, on the doorstep of middle age, he remains a formidable stage presence. Last year he was among 12 “Outstanding Performer” nominees for a Bessie Award, New York City’s dance equivalent of a Tony. Krishnan was in fine company. The winner was American Ballet Theatre superstar Herman Cornejo.

Reviewing the show that earned Krishnan his nomination, New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay wrote: “He has the speaking eyes, the flourishing gesture, the cascading and pounding rhythm to make Bharatanatyam compelling. You feel him seizing the audience with his glances, complex meters, fully three-dimensional phrases — even with an isolated finger.”

Brendan Healy, Buddies’ artistic director, approvingly describes Krishnan as “a bit of a showman,” in the sense that he values theatrical flair and high production standards. Even if the results may not prove palatable to all tastes, there’s never anything half-baked about Krishnan’s work.

Healy says he had been aware of Krishnan and his 14-year-old inDANCE company for some time but it was when he saw a revival of the choreographer’s 2011 Quicksand that he recognized its boundary-breaking appropriateness for Buddies.

“It’s a beautiful piece,” says Healy. “Its subject matter is rich and intercultural. I like how Hari blends classical and contemporary, invoking various traditions. I always detect a queer undercurrent in his work, but he draws on so many other aspects of his identity.”

Krishnan would certainly endorse the last part of Healy’s observation.

“Sexuality is an open-ended thing,” he says. “My queerness is only part of the palette of what I am as a human being.”

The version of Quicksand being presented this week in tandem with SKIN has evolved considerably since its Harbourfront Centre premiere. For one thing, it’s had to be reconfigured for a different space. The underlying concept remains: a contemporary reimagining of Indian classical dance’s nine archetypal moods or emotions, the Navarasa, but how these are expressed has been modified.

Krishnan says the work was originally conceived with a largely South Asian audience in mind. He was deliberately intent on turning conventions on their head. It was also informed by contemporary events. A chest-beating section expressing valour was influenced by thoughts of Nelson Mandela and of 2011’s Arab Spring. Mandela is now dead. The Arab uprisings have deflated or been suppressed.

Similarly, the emotion of fear connected to the lingering association of HIV/AIDS and death. Krishnan has remodelled it more abstractly, to conjure fear of the loss of physical desirability and of mortality.

“It’s about facing our worst nightmares,” Krishnan explains. “Overall there’s been a lot of retweaking. Quicksand is no longer culture specific. It now offers a larger, more accessible world view.”

With WorldPride about to burst over Toronto next month, Krishnan sees his new show as “an amazing opportunity to pay tribute to Toronto’s vibrant gay community.”

SKIN and Quicksand are at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St., May 21 to 24; http://buddiesinbadtimes.com/ buddiesinbadtimes.comEND or 416-975-8555.

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